Reviews

Record #974: My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges (2008)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

When you’re as obsessive about music as I am, you’re constantly on the hunt. As frequently as I might buy a record though, I’m always listening to several new albums while I’m getting into the ones I end up buying. As much as my collection serves as a snapshot of what I was into at any given point in my life, a lot of what I was listening to is out of frame.

My Morning Jacket is one of those bands that has existed just outside of my financial commitment for a long time—especially this record. There were a number of times where I was actively debating between buying a copy of Evil Urges and something else, and Evil Urges never won out. That is, until a few months ago where a copy popped up at the right place at the right time and we reunited.

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Record #973: The Mountain Goats – Beat the Champ (2015)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It seems that I must continue to belabor the point that there are many, many, many blind spots in my musical perspective. I am constantly in a state of confessing my ignorance of well revered artists, drawing reactions of “what do you mean you’ve never listened to…” Usually, I remind them that I like, just got into the Cure.

The Mountain Goats is one of these bands. Despite however much I’ve heard their name thrown around by tastemakers I respect or listed alongside bands I love, I have looked at their substantial discography and passed on the massive excavation project ahead of me.

But, I’m also a massive wrestling fan. And so when my friend Josh brought the oft-heard refrain that I neeeed to listen to the Mountain Goats, he tied an extra juicy carrot to the end of that string: Beat the Champ, a folk rock album about pro wrestling. And while this sort of project could be played for humor—and there’s plenty of humor to be found—John Darnielle handles the subject with a reverence that only a true wrestling fan can muster.

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Record #972: Mogwai – Come On Die Young (1999)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It’s hard to overstate just how pivotal a release Young Team was. Before that record, the term “post rock” was used to describe a large variety of vaguely experimental groups that drew more from Krautrock and jazz than pop rock traditions: bands like Tortoise, Bark Psychosis, June of 44, even Stereolab.

On the other side of that record though, the term conjures images of heavily effected electric guitars and dramatic songwriting. It was such a sea change that as more bands started using those building blocks to similar effect, they were lambasted as Mogwai ripoffs.

Mogwai themselves seemed conscious of this, and sought to distance themselves. Their sophomore record is still mostly instrumental guitar-based music, but their penchant for increasing the dynamics of the songs until they break apart is largely gone.

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Record #971: Morella’s Forest – Ultraphonic Hiss (1996)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

As a music fan in the pre-streaming era, one of the best tools at your disposal was the back catalogs of your favorite record labels. And as a youth group kid in the early 2000s, I was naturally a huge acolyte of the Christian punk label Tooth & Nail Records.

As a fan of bands like Further Seems Forever, mewithoutYou, and Stavesacre though, there were some surprises waiting in their back catalog. The label was a surprising hotbed of shoegaze, lo-fi, and dreampop in the ’90s. Punk acts like MxPx and Ghoti Hook were labelmates with bands like Mike Knott, Starflyer 59, and Morella’s Forest. These last two bands would be my entry point into shoegaze, years before I had the language for it.

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Record #970: Mustard Plug – Evildoers Beware! (1997)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

For the better part of the last decade, I have been the frontman for a ska punk band called Dad Jokes. But that whole time, I’ve been harboring a dirty secret.

I actually never really got that into ska.

My “ska phase” as a teen consisted of a couple Five Iron Frenzy CDs, the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack, and the necessary singles from Mighty Mighty Bosstones, No Doubt, and the O.C. Supertones, and basically nothing outside of that. I’ve been trying to fix that since playing in a ska band, but that section of my collection is exceptionally slow-growing.

That said, when the opportunity comes to close that gap a little, I jump at it. Like this copy of Mustard Plug’s seminal Evildoers Beware! which I found at a vendor tent at Furnace Fest ’21 (I told you my backlog was ridiculous) and bought it without a thought.

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Record #979: Midwife – Luminol (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Moving now from one of heavy metal’s most celebrated champions to a hushed artist who calls her brand of music “Heaven metal” (but not in a Stryper way). Listening to Midwife’s output, it might seem like that tag is a joke. But while there isn’t anything obviously metallic (or even heavy) on Luminol, there are glints of sharpness glimmering in the muted, shoegazey atmospheres that betray a sensibility forged in the fires of heavy metal—and if you can’t tell by hearing, their place on the Flenser’s roster should fill you in.

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Record #978: Metallica – Master of Puppets (1986)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Alright, this one might demand some explanation.

I have a general dislike of Metallica. I have not been quiet about this opinion. I have said often and loudly that they are one of the most overrated bands ever. People often will retort, “the first four records though,” to which I usually respond, “first three, and even then.”

And yeah, there were plenty of better metal bands around the time that deserved the success Metallica got (Iron Maiden, Slayer, Death, to name a few).

But overrated doesn’t necessarily mean bad.

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Record #977: Men As Trees – Weltschmerz & Sea of Ice Songs (2023)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

As I’ve written before, I have mostly ignored skramz until I just recently discovered that there’s actually a lot of skramz that I really, really, really, really like. My ignorance of the subgenre was so strong though that I even missed some of the excellent screamo that was happening in my own backyard.

Exhibit A in the case against me is Men As Trees, who would later become Locktender—who I have known and loved for the last few years, but haven’t dug too deeply into their former project (I blame guitarist Andrew Kallicragas’new projects Pack Sounds and JAGALCHI for distracting me). That is, until this reissue, which combines their 2008 LP Weltschmerz with the later EP Sea of Ice Songs (the latter of which was based on the same painter as  Locktender’s Friederich).

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Record #976: Maus Haus – Lark Marvels (2008)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

For one brief and wonderful period in the early days of the Millennium, indie rock merged together with ’60s psychedelic and ’90s lo-fi to create a fearless and fresh sound that lived somewhere between synthpop, jangle pop, and dance punk. MGMT were certainly the standard bearers of the movement, but its territory stretched from Grizzly Bear to Animal Collective. Heck, even Battles flirted with it for a while.

Around this time, a group of local artists opened a space called LangLab: an old factory renovated to house artist studios, gallery space, and a performance arts venue. One of the early shows I saw there was the Bay Area act Maus Haus, who nailed this sound to a tee. I couldn’t afford a copy of the album they were touring at the time, but I happened upon it a local shop recently and had to have it.

And it’s just as fresh as I remember. Continue reading →